Andy Warhol`s vibrant Liz Taylor sold for £11.4m

A distinctive Andy Warhol painting of actress Dame Elizabeth Taylor has been sold for $23.7m (£11.4m) at a New York auction. It was purchased by an anonymous bidder – but didn` get over the $25m (£11.9m) which it was expected to do. Completed in 1963, and called Liz, the portrait is actually Liz recovering from an illness. `I started those a long time ago when she was so sick and everybody said she was going to die,” Mr Warhol said at the time.
“Now I am doing them all over, putting bright colours on her lips and eyes.” Warhol also produced similar works of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. In May a painting of a car crash sold for $71.7m (£36.3m), a record for a Warhol piece. The 1963 painting, Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I), depicted an overturned car on fire. American artist Warhol was leading figure in the Pop Art movement, and he experimented by creating artworks from mass-produced images from American popular culture. Born in 1928, he died unexpectedly in 1987 in a New York hospital following a gall bladder operation. (Via BBC)